Too soon for a fiesta

Nearly 4 million illegal immigrants thought they finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel and started to celebrate after they heard President Obama’s speech but maybe they should’ve waited before popping the champagne bottles.

On Nov. 20, President Obama used his executive power to offer work authorization, temporary legal status, social security, and medicare to the undocumented parents of children who are U.S. citizens, or permanent residents, as long as they lived in the United-States for at least five years, pass a background check, and pay taxes. That’s 36 percent of the estimated 11 million illegal aliens who are living in America’s shadows. During his first bid for the presidency in 2008, Obama promised he would reform immigration within his first year in office. He waited nearly six years to tackle the issue as immigrant communities started to grow impatient.

In the meantime, his administration has been deporting illegal immigrants at a record rate.

“The government is going after criminals, gang bangers, people who are hurting the community,” Obama told the New York Times. “Not after students, not after folks who are here just because they’re trying to figure out how to feed their families.”

Is that so Mr. President?

“For years, the Obama administration’s spin has been that they are simply deporting so-called ‘criminal aliens,’ but the numbers speak for themselves,”Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center told the New York Times. “In truth, this administration more than any other has devastated immigrant communities across the country, tearing families away from loved ones, simply because they drove without a license, or re-entered the country desperately trying to be reunited with their family members.”

Also a New york Times analysis shows that since Obama took office, two-thirds of the nearly 2 million deportation cases involve people who had committed minor infractions, including traffic violations. Some had no criminal record.

Those cases have quadrupled from 43,000 during the last five years of former President George W. Bush’s administration, to 193,000 during the first five years of Obama’s, according to the New York Times.

Janet Murguia, the president of the National Council of La Raza, the country’s largest Hispanic civil rights organization is now even calling him the “deporter-in-chief” in the New York Times.

The reason the president is deciding to offer a break to 4 million illegal immigrants is that after his party was crushed during the last mid-term election, he knows when the Grand Old Party (GOP) regain control of the House and Senate next year, he won’t be able to maneuver freely. If Democrats want to keep the White House in 2016, they need the Hispanic vote.
Obama knows it is now or never on immigration reform. Unfortunately, it will not be easy for Obama to convince GOP leaders, who already declared they would fight. With a Dec. 11 deadline for next year’s budget, there may be another government shutdown. The battle has begun, with 17 states, led by Texas, suing the Obama administration over its recent action.

The percentage of illegal immigrants affected by the president’s action is comparable to sn action by former President George H. W. Bush in 1990.

Republicans are so mad at the president now that they want to punish him by refusing to invite him to the Capitol to give his State of the Union address according to the Washington Post. What are they going to do next? Unfriend him on Facebook? While Republicans are being total hypocrites, families are being ripped apart.

In April 2010, an 11-year-old girl named Arlette Rocha, was found hanging from the stairway of her home in an apparent suicide, some eight months after her father was deported to Mexico. Unfortunately, this kind of tragic story is far from uncommon.

Republicans hold the fate of millions of families in their hands; people who came to this country so their children would have a chance at a better life. For some, the President’s action could be the difference between life and death, so it is time now that Republicans do what’s right, not only for immigrant families but for this country by supporting their Commander in Chief. America has drifted from what once made this country so exceptional in the eyes of the world … being a welcoming nation.

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breath free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” This is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty and it once meant something.